A male Sumatran orangutan challenges a rival by baring his teeth and shaking branches. Now recognized as a distinct species, Sumatran orangutans number around 14,000 in the wild.

The below article is one of the best short articles I have read in a long time about the trials and tribulations of doing research on orangutans. While reading it, I was struck by the similarity between what orangutan researchers put up with and what bigfoot field researchers deal with, and what professionals biologists will have to deal with after species recognition. Long excursions to desolate locations, listening for howls and calls to locate the creatures, and difficulty visually observing the animals are all commonalities while doing field work on these elusive and solitary apes.

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve chosen the most difficult thing in the world to study,”
– Cheryl Knott, biological anthropologist

I’m sure it feels like this to Cheryl Knott, but bigfoot research after the species is recognized by science will be even harder. Like orangutans, sasquatches seem to live mostly solitarly lives, or if they do travel in groups, they do so at a distance from one another. Orangutans also have large territories and wander widely, but being a terrestrial species rather than the arboreal orangutans, sasquatch range would be much larger, and they would move much faster.

Keep these challenges in mind as you read the below article. Also, note the behavioral similarities between sasquatches and orangutans, such as the long calls and pushing down of trees in territorial displays. Articles like this leave me wondering about what unknown sasquatch behaviors they share with orangutans and the other apes that are waiting to be observed.

Inside the Private Lives of Orangutans

Scientists are gaining vital insights into the red apes at a time when they face a precarious future.

By Mel White

Photographs and Videos by Tim Laman

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve chosen the most difficult thing in the world to study,” Cheryl Knott tells me as we sit beneath the rain forest canopy at her orangutan research station in western Borneo. The high-pitched, dental-drill sound of cicadas fills the air, at times forcing us to pause our conversation. As we talk, Knott’s associates are at work in the surrounding forest of Indonesia’s Gunung Palung National Park with GPS units and iPads, following orangutans in their daily wanderings, recording what they’re doing, what they’re eating, and how they’re interacting with others of their species.

Unlike gorillas and chimpanzees—fellow great apes that live in groups and can be followed and observed relatively easily—orangutans live mostly solitary lives. They spend nearly all their time in the treetops, they wander widely, and for the most part they inhabit rugged forest or swampy lowland that’s hard for humans to traverse. As a result, orangutans long remained among the least known of Earth’s large land animals. Only during the past 20 years or so has scientific evidence begun to outweigh speculation as a new generation of researchers has tracked the elusive apes across the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the only places orangutans live.

An interesting news item caught my attention this week. Apparently, an orangutan in the Indianapolis Zoo has learned to repeat and mimic the pitch of open vowel sounds. This shows that great apes have the capacity to learn to control their muscles to deliberately alter pitch and shape of the sounds they make. This would be a necessary precursor to having language ability.

It is already well established that some individual great apes can think and communicate using symbols. Koko the gorilla that uses sign language is the best known example of this. The discovery of an ape that mimics conversational tones is another interesting tidbit in our uncovering the mysteries of our greatest gift that seems to separate us from our more hirsute cousins, the use of language.

There are some excellent observations of sasquatches seemingly talking to one another in what seems to be more of a language than mere animal noises. One witness from the Oregon Coast described to me what seemed to her like a language that mixed phonemes from Southeast Asia and the Native tribes of Southeastern Alaska (she had experience with both the Vietnamese language, as well as the language used by the Haida people from Prince Edward Island). Interestingly, she noted that there were clicks and pops in the vocal chattering that reminded her of the Bushman, or Khoisan, language. These sounds were articulated by two distinct voices in what seemed like a conversation.

It is possible that sasquatches are just muttering to one another with no meaning behind the sounds, but I find this unlikely. The two creatures bouncing their mutterings back and forth strongly suggest some sort of conversation. It makes sense to me that since sasquatches are so human-like, they have some eerily human similarities, such as language, or at least a proto-language.

The orangutan in the Indianapolis zoo is showing us, once again, the amazing abilities of great apes. They are not so different than us, and indeed show us what we once were sort of like millions of years ago. It’s akin to looking at a child and seeing us as individuals in a less-developed state. There is no lack of love or compassion in our view of children, so there should be no less in our view of apes from our species’ perspective.

To understand what Rocky did, imagine if you meowed at your cat and it was able to mimic you completely. You start out in a high-pitch voice and then your cat surprises you by responding with the same high-pitch call. And then when you drop into a Barry White voice, your cat responds with its own seductively deep meow to match.

An Orangutan’s Mimicry Offers Clues to Language’s Origins

Orangutan hear, orangutan do.

Researchers at the Indianapolis Zoo observed an orangutan mimic the pitch and tone of human sounds, for the first time. The finding, which was published Wednesday, provides insight into the evolutionary origin of human speech, the team said.

“It really redefines for us what we know about the capabilities of orangutans,” said Rob Shumaker, director of the zoo and an author on the paper. “What we have to consider now is the possibility that the origins of spoken language are not exclusively human, and that they may have come from great apes.”

Rocky, an 11-year-old orangutan at the zoo, has a special ability. He can make sounds using his vocal folds, or voice box, that resemble the vowel “A,” and sound like “Ah.” The noises, or “wookies” as the researchers called them, are variations of the same vocalization.

Sometimes the great ape would say high-pitched “wookies” and sometimes he would say his “Ahs” in a lower pitch.

The researchers note that the sounds are specific to Rocky and ones that he used everyday. No other orangutan, captive or wild, made these noises. Rocky, who had never lived in the rain forest, apparently learned the skill during his time as an entertainment orangutan before coming to the zoo. He was at one point the most seen orangutan in movies and commercials,according to the zoo.